| dc.contributor.author | Bennett, Evelyn Nora. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:37:23Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2002 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2002 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ75717 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55869 | |
| dc.description | Literary scholars have long produced rhetorical analyses of early modern verse written by men, but have virtually ignored the role women poets might have played in the rhetorical tradition. In this study, I address this gap by analyzing the verse of three prominent women writers of Elizabethan and Jacobean England: Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth, and Aemilia Lanyer. The work of these writers demonstrates that their habits of thought were as rhetorical as those of their male contemporaries. Part of this study is thus comparative: the work of each of these women writers is closely considered in relation to that of one or more of the period's male poets. | en_US |
| dc.description | The thesis begins by sketching the sociocultural and literary milieu in which these women wrote, and goes on to highlight some of the conceptual and rhetorical issues that figured prominently in early modern England. The subsequent chapters examine how each of these three poets relies on rhetorical tools and thought for poetic expression, and show how rhetoric enables the articulation and comprehension of what sixteenth-century rhetorician Henry Peacham calls "diuine and humane thinges." I argue that these women writers are not only as rhetorically and poetically accomplished as their male counterparts, but that they are sophisticated thinkers who willingly tackle some conceptual problems that remain as challenging today as when their poetry was written. Despite differences in genre and emphasis, their work nevertheless reveals that all three poets are deeply aware of the ambiguous nature of language and the complex relationship of things human and divine. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2002. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Women's Studies. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | Women writing of divinest things: Rhetoric and the early modern poet. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
